Yahoo and MSN hate me

Google analytics is a great tool. It helps me track where my visitors are coming from. The vast majority of my traffic comes from search engines picking up my old posts. But not all search engines send me traffic. Really its just one, Google. So far in the month of December google drove in a whopping 94% of search engine traffic. I submit sitemaps to all three search engines and yet only google ranks me high enough to be noticed. Frustrating.

Nintendo Search Engine

Information about Nintendo is spread across the internet. Because of this finding specific information about Nintendo games, systems and plans can be frustrating.

I have created a google custom search engine that focuses in on websites that talk about nintendo. At this moment I am up to 45 sites being indexed. Hopefully other find this as useful as I do!

Try it today with a simple search for "Manhunt 2" and quickly find out all kinds of information about the game

I am constantly looking for new sites and blogs to add to the list of indexed pages. If you know of one that should be included please let me know. If you run a small blog this can be a great way to drive more traffic to your site.

Shiny Games

I have been playing with google calendar lately. One problem I am noticing is say I want to know the release dates for games on the DS well there are lots and lots of games coming out and I only care about a few of them. Yes I can turn off and on the display of the calendar BUT none the less seeing all these games is a bit overwhelming. To combat this I have gone through the list of games coming out in 2007 and created a new calendar with only the titles I care about. This calendar is public.



This solution is not really ideal. What would be nice is for a site to keep track of all the dates and then I could select games to watch. Then the site would give me a link to a my calendar in ical format which would only show the games that I care about on it. Does such a site already exist?

Feed readers are terrible

I have a love hate relationship with RSS feed readers. Every once in awhile I try and get into them but end up getting frustrated and reverting back to just checking sites for updates. Whats the problem? Information overload. Like to check the top articles on Digg? Watch whats happens when you add digg's RSS feed to your feed reader. I didn't check it for ONE day and I had over a 1000 back entries. Add a couple more firehose sites and you have just created an information flood.

Using feed readers this way is obviously not ideal. Overtime and many attempts later I have discovered how to use feed readers so its not so overwhelming. A year ago I was trying to find a site to had news about recent events from Google. I couldn't really find it. I could find a handful of blogs that were covering happenings at Google. Also I found the collection of corporate blogs that google uses to communicate with the public. Instead of tracking these ~30 or so sites seperatly I decided to add them all to google reader. This setup worked perfectly there are only about 10-15 or so new articles coming in a day and each article hold interesting information that I want to read. Where before I was getting blasted with so much information 9 times out of 10 I could care less about what the article was talking about.

I hope this helps someone else tame the beast and happy reading.

Here is the short version. Rules for taming a feed reader:
* No aggregating sites such as slashdot, digg etc
* Only pick sites that have quality posts not links to posts with brief comments
* Limit the amount of feeds that you track

Google Docs

Apparently google docs now lets you post documents to your blog. This feature may have always been there, but I am testing it right now. If you can see this then it works!

Update:
Well it showed up fine. The good is it was very easy to set up and publish a document. The bad is it did not add the document name to the Title of the post. Secondly, it did not embed the tags into the post. Overall a very cool feature. If your interested the currently supported API are: Blogger, MoveableType, MetaWeblog.

Google Talk embraces world

I got on this morning to see a system wide message from the owner of my jabber server stating the google talk servers are receiving IM and presence data now! I just tested it, he was right, I can im my gmail name from the server. All you gtalk users out there shoot me a im: esavior@ursine.ca

Google Maps API

Google finally released API for google maps awhile back. You can read about it here

Some people have been doing some really cool things with it.

Storm Report Map - Map data mixed with weather data
Recent Earthquakes - See all earthquakes over 2.5M

Chicago Crime Map - Crime data linked with google maps

Traffic Map - View realtime traffic data

Housing Map - Find residence across the US